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304 Part V: Gearing Up: Outfitting Your Arsenal TEAM LinG
Acoustic guitars require more strength in the left hand to fret than do
electrics because their necks are thicker and the string gauges are heavier. So
acoustic-blues players often make string-gauge choices based solely on lefthand
fretting and bending ability. Light gauge is far and away the most popular
choice for acoustic blues players.
Electric strings
You’ll do plenty of string-bending in electric-blues guitar but not to the
extremes found in rock, for example. So you may want to run with a slightly
heavier gauge for blues than rock, with all other things being equal. For
instance, if you like a nine in rock, you might go with a ten in blues. Table 16-2
lists the common string sets for the electric guitar according to their gauges.
String sets are often referred to by their first-string measurement. So the set
listed in Table 16-2 as Super light is called a nine.
Table 16-2
Common Electric-Guitar String Sets by Gauge
String Set Name 1 2 3 4 5 6
Super light .009 .011 .016 .024 .032 .042
Regular light .010 .013 .017 .026 .036 .046
Medium .011 .014 .018 .028 .038 .049
Heavy .012 .016 .020 .032 .042 .054
Outfitting Your String-Changing Toolkit
You don’t need any tools to change strings. But using a couple of simple
items found in any hardware store (and shown in Figure 16-1) can at least
speed up the job and are worth having. Saving time leaves you with more
time to play the blues and may actually save your skin — like if you’re on
stage and you break a string in the first verse and have to replace it by the
time your next guitar solo comes around — because you’ve been practicing
that solo for weeks! Following is a list of three essential items that no timeconscious
blues player should leave home without.
String winder: These plastic cranks make quick work of the tedious job
of turning your tuning keys. To bring a new, slack string up to pitch takes
many, many revolutions of the tuning key. The string winder takes a
fraction of the time. For acoustic players, a string winder has an added